'Discuss Merle Hodge’S Crick Crack Monkey As a Novel Essay\r'

' ousel Hodge born in 1944, in Trinidad is the daughter of an immigration officer. After plainlyt endvass at the Bishop Anstey’s high school of Trinidad, she obtained the Trinidad and Tobago Girls Island lore in 1962 which led her to the university college of capital of the United Kingdom. She obtained a degree in French and posterior in 1967 a get over Philosophy degree. Merle Hodge traveled a deal in Eastern and Western Europe and when she returned to Trinidad she started training French in junior schools. Later she obtained a post of lecturer at the University of the West Indies. In 1979, she started to work for the bishop regime and she was appointed director of the registering of curriculum. In 1983, she left Grenada because the bishop was assassinated and she is now on the job(p) for the Women and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.\r\nShe wrote the bracing wrick see to it sc exclusivelyywag in 1970 w here she deals with t he field of meditate of childhood in the West Indies. The main genius c in alled position bears with Tantie who is a working class woman. She later goes to live with her aunty Beatrice and she faces a new and antithetical domain of a function from that of her Caribbean knowledge domain: â€Å"Hodge’s story is passed by dint of the eyes of a black, lower class girlfriend of Trinidad in the 1950s.” The whole story is angiotensin-converting enzyme presented from iodine point of view: pose’s. She is left however if by her father who goes abroad after the terminal of her stick and she has to live with her lower class Tantie where she learns virtually being independent.\r\nLater in the story her aunt Beatrice takes her and she then has to adapt herself to the ‘white’ world. She faces a band of ethnical and identity mesh as she does non really know where she belongs or what nicety is handle or right. â€Å"However, looking at t he story of â€Å" twirl crack monkey” by the eyes of a new-fashioned white girl, rather than a young black girl, the reader might see the blemish and the ethnic discrimination that a black person must endure. She would non be accustomed to being called a â€Å"little black nincompoop” (Hodge 457), and she would some likely non shake to suffer a physical obtaining with a ruler (Hodge 456)”\r\n set constrains the narrator and Hodge guides the reader through an â€Å"intensely personalised study of the effects of the colonial imposition of confused social and pagan values on the Trinidadian female.” tee up narrates the diverse problems in her life in such a appearance that it is often multiform to split up â€Å"the percentage of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably.” It has often been seen that the British bewilder used various technique s to influence the viewpoints of the Caribbean pack. â€Å"The citizenry’s self aw atomic number 18ness, religion, quarrel, and gloss has coped with the influx of British ideals and in coping, the masses throw off changed to appease the islands’ highly prestigious British population.”\r\n twirl Crack Monkey is do to be a young dealing with the conflict of socializations that lay has to accept. We first meet tee up when her develop dies and she is portrayed as being surrounded by people. She experiences ‘crowd-scenes’ where she has all her family and friends around her to give her support. At Tantie’s theatre of operations, she had Tantie’s loud posture and when she was absent she had the presence of other children. This in a stylus is manipulate to reflect the Caribbean horti tillage where either one is fiery and caring and where the people like to stay in c erstrt and entertain social relationships: â€Å"As Yakin i Kemp placards, â€Å"she [ head] is moving more and more toward the development of a positive self-image while she resides with Tantie” (24).\r\n golf tee is do to be independent and having a voice for herself in the Trinidadian society. She has a confident temperament which has been molded by the civilization in which she was brio. These episodes where golf tee is made to be surrounded by the people of Trinidad argon made to contrast with the isolation and the aloneness which set is made to olfaction at her aunt Beatrice’s place: â€Å"these scenes set up a contrast to the loneliness the narrator-protagonists volition experience once removed from their original environment and placed into a Western or Western-aspiring one. What Marjorie Thorpe has said more or less(predicate) Crick Crack Monkey thus can in like manner be said for Bedford’s novel: â€Å" end-to-end the novel Hodge contrasts the warmth and congeniality of Tantie’s theat er with the loneliness and isolation which teeing ground experiences at aunty Beatrice’s” (36)\r\nIn Crick Crack Monkey Hodge makes the isolation felt by tee become associated with pagan mania. She had ever been said to belong to an increase family shade where she feels divorce of the family plainly the western enculturation makes her feel forth of place and she thus feels disoriented from both refinings at a certain point. This alienation march is depicted through the f bend that Tee has to move from an Antillean kitchen-gardening to a supposedly European destination: â€Å"In this novel Merle Hodge presents the process of alienation by depicting Tee’s transition from a typical Antillean tradition to that of a pseudo-European finish.” Tee is made to balance herself amidst the culture of Tantie who gives her â€Å"the promise of staying on with the original culture of the Caribbean islands” and mingled with aunty Beatrice who gi ves her a prospect of another(prenominal) culture: â€Å"Aunt Beatrice offers the lure of abroad †a culture that Tee slowly becomes familiar with but does not belong to.”\r\nIt is seen that, while Tantie and Aunt Beatrice represent varied perceptions of cultures which were present in the island, Ma, Tee’s Grandma, represents another culture. She is the one who tells the children â€Å"‘nancy” stories and she is near to the Tee’s African roots. Tee visiting her grandmother makes her realize that: â€Å"Ma’s sayings often began on a contrast of familiarity only to rise into an impressive incomprehensibility, or crime versa, as in ‘Them that walketh in the paths of corruption will live to ketch dey arse”. The threesome women in Tee’s life makes her realize that each one belongs to a class and a culture which is on the face of it different from each other and Tee is inefficient to unsounded understand the culture of her Grandmother so she becomes alienated from the African culture in a way. She is left with Tantee’s culture and with Aunt Beatrice’s culture where both culture makes her in a way lose her own identity.\r\nIn Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, Tee’s instruction is responsible for her internalization of the European or the western culture. It is found in the novel that even before Tee is made to go and live with her Anglicized Aunt Beatrice she has to learn about their culture where things which she has intentional in her Caribbean culture does not exist â€Å"Books transported you invariably into the familiar solidity of chimneys and apple trees, the enviable newton of real Girls and Boys who went a-sleighing and built snowmen, ate potatoes, not rice, went about in socks and shoes from morning until night and called things by their proper names, never saying â€Å"washicong” for plimsoll or â€Å"crapaud” when they meant a frog. Bo oks transported you always into reality and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad. (61)”\r\nIt has often been seen that the colonial commandment was part of massive artillery to colonize the mind of the people and that this helped to consolidate the colonialists business leader and culture. It is said that the ‘whole educational apparatus was geared towards ethnical domination by consent’ and that in a way it on the whole destroyed the culture and the cultural education of the colonise people. They were in fact alienated from their own culture through the colonized education and they were made to require an environment where they would desire the Eurocentric culture. This is in a way what happens to Tee who is made to feel alienated from her own culture by the colonial education she is given.\r\nTee’s education thus in a sense puts her in an unbearable secernate: â€Å"since her own world does not have the similar cultural referents as the one sh e is taught to regard as â€Å"correct,” she is forever trying to â€Å"catch up,” always seeing herself in terms of a world which can never be her own because it is always elsewhere.” She is always lacking in her acceptance of this culture: â€Å"her whole socialization process comes to affirm that however numerous of the cultural standards prescribed by the educational system, her teachers, or Aunt Beatrice she come afters, she always falls short †and so do her teachers and Aunt Beatrice, who are similarly caught in a cycle of self-denial and self-hatred.”\r\nTantie representing the Caribbean culture warns Tee not to get carried by the colonialist instructions and this model comes in cartridge holder when Hodge introduces the teacher, Mr. Hinds who â€Å"is bent on sprightliness an side reality in the face of the facts of the Caribbean because he holds positionness as the highest value in his life, and so it is not surprising that â€Å"[e] e realone knew that Mr. Hinds had been up to England” because he is eager to allow everyone know about it.\r\nHis devotion to the metropolis assumes a worshipful attitude illustrated by his â€Å"daily strain to bring the boys to a state of reverence” towards a â€Å"large framed portrait of Churchill” (24).” He makes the colonial education, the center of his teachings and what he teaches the students does not even take the Caribbean reality that the children are living. He tries to instill the English culture in the students: â€Å"from apples to Christmas to snow and the haystacks the children learn about in their school primers †who do not have any lived knowledge of England, thus attempting to erase Caribbeanness in them as it has been erased in him.”\r\nThere is one passing which addresses the issue of language, identity and of culture. Mr. Hinds being irritated with his students says, â€Å"‘hither I stand, trying to teach you to read and draw up the English language, trying to teach confounded piccaninnies to read and write. . . . I who have marched to glory side by side with His Majesty’s bravest men †I don’t have to stand here and busy myself with . . . little black nincompoops” (29).\r\nThis in a way reflects the culture which is often adopted by the western world where people think that the way you speak is a representation of yourself proposed by Ashcroft. The students are made to reject their local language to adopt the language of the colonizer and the”use of the language highlights cultural specificity” when the vernacular language is inserted in the novel. The very description of the vernacular in written English gives it capable status to â€Å"mainstream” English and linguistically symbolizes an act of opposition and a cultural alternative †Creole culture †that, in the plot of the novel, is marked by a relative wholeness when juxtaposed t o Mr. Hinds’ and Aunt Beatrice’s self-alienation, which is expressed in the above passage through Mr. Hinds’ concern with having his students learn â€Å"proper” English.\r\nAccording to Frantz Fanon: â€Å" every(prenominal) colonized people †in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority composite plant has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality †finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his hobo camp status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (18)” Mr. Hinds is the representation of the colonized man who tries to act white.\r\nHe creates walls between himself and the children where he is in a way rejecting his own blackness and is trying to make them accept the culture of the colon ized through language: â€Å"attempting to make them like himself, with language as a primary standard of culture, he also tries to exhibit his own cultural â€Å"redeemability,” the possibility of becoming English.” Tantie represents the Caribbean culture and thus she tries to preserve it in Tee. It seems that the culture in which Tee is living is mixed with the European culture and on that point are many agents of ‘westernization’ which are present in the society. Mr. Hinds seems only to be a peter who has been employed to prepare Tee for her awaiting life at the abode of Aunt Beatrice: â€Å"it is for good reason that Tantie warns Tee of such indoctrination in the vernacular, since the vernacular is the only cultural basis for Tantie (and potentially for Tee) from which to launch a defense.”\r\nThe novel shows that the children have to go to Aunt Beatrice’s place in order to obtain the proper education and Tantie has to let the childre n live with Aunt Beatrice. In a way she knows that the colonial education and system is all that matters to succeed in the world. It seems that Aunt Beatrice’s westernized house is the only ‘proper’ place for the children to stay because it contains all the cultural values of the Europeans. At her comer in that location it is immediately shown how the world of aunt Beatrice is different when Tee’s and Todan are made fun of because of their wearing apparel and color: â€Å"Not only color and features are under scrutiny concerning their similarities and dissimilarities to European beauty standards, but so are apparel, as Tee finds out when her cousins inspect her wardrobe soon after her (second) arrival: â€Å". . .\r\nWe are shown how with the phenomenon of â€Å"double consciousness,” Du Bois’ term: â€Å"While Du Bois speaks of African Americans looking at themselves through the eyes of racialist whites, Tee looks at herself through th e eyes of her cousins, who have so thoroughly imbibed a British colonialist world view that nothing appears to exist resembling even remnants of a Caribbean identity.” makes Tee feel alive(predicate) of her color and of her clothes as compared to her colonized cousins.\r\nWhen Tee had gone to Aunt Beatrice’s place the first time, she used to beat up her cousins and later on when she goes there once more she is in a way crippled by her education and through her indoctrination of the standards of the European culture. The first time she had Tantie’s culture fully present in her, she had all her Caribbeaness in her and had not been made aware that she has to judge herself by the standards of others and that the European culture was the cuticle along which she should judge herself and her achievements: â€Å"Tee has already been indoctrinated into standards of â€Å" naive realism and Rightness” and she recognizes her cousins as being closer to the anglophi l standards instilled in her, quelling the resistance against their denigration that was still available to her when she drew her world view and military group from Tantie’s cultural orb.”\r\nIn this new world which is different from the world of Tantie, all that represents the African culture is denigrated and shown to be insignificant. Aunt Beatrice in every way makes Tee feels that the white world and culture is ultimate and the clothes she had brought is seen as ‘niggery’ and everything connected with Europeans is adorned and there is the example of the photograph of the ‘white ancestress: â€Å"Such cultism of â€Å"white blood” illustrates that Aunt Beatrice does not and admire and strive to emulate English culture, but that her Anglophilia is ultimately rooted in racist and Darwinist beliefs in the superiority of bloodlines and â€Å"races.” Thus, in her eyes, African ancestry in and of itself is a liability, not merely Afric an culturally acquired styles and behaviors. This explains her manic attempt to erase everything in herself, in her daughters, and in Tee, reminiscent of such ancestry”. She is in a way trying to alienate the Caribbean culture in Tee just as Mr. Hinds had act to do.\r\nTee is made to feel alienated from the world she used to know. In this new world she is made to feel powerless and she feels that she cannot cope when she has to speak or when she dresses as she cannot and is not fully accepted in this Europeanized world of her cousins: â€Å"As Ketu Katrak has said, â€Å"Beatrice cultivates bourgeois values that abominate blackness in every form †cutis color, speech patterns, food” (66), and this is a legacy from which Tee cannot escape”. She does not belong to the culture of Tantie anymore and nor does she belong to the culture of the Aunt Beatrice ad she only feels torn between the two. This is shown when she cannot accept the food brought to her by Ta ntie and: â€Å"The final scene demonstrates that Tee now lives between the worlds, not belonging to either. Unable ever to be accepted fully into Aunt Beatrice’s household and Englishness, she is also alien to Tantie’s world.”\r\nKetu Katrak says that â€Å"Colonized people’s mental colonization through English language education, British values, and culture result in states of exclusion and alienation. Such alienations are experienced in conditions of mental exile within one’s own culture to which, given one’s education, one un-belongs.” (62) Tee has received an education and a western culture which is very much inappropriate the culture of Tantie and which in a way makes her feel the dullness of her Caribbean culture and of Tantie’s world. Tee feels alienated and marginalized since the time she has started to learn the European culture and she did not feel this before in Tantie’s household. Tee’s alienation le ads her to hopelessness and feelings that she is unworthy of living: â€Å"(Thorpe 37): â€Å"I wanted to shrink, to disappear. . . . I felt that the very sight of me was an affront to common decency.\r\nI wished that my luggage compartment could shrivel up and fall away, that I could measuring rod out new and acceptable” (97). Though she does not actually contemplate killing herself, her self-hatred and ardor to assimilate are the cultural equivalent of suicide.” Tee is found without a culture and ‘Aunt Beatrice’s self-negating and self-hating cultural influence’ on her seems to destroy her identity. Tee is unable to live in both culture and the novel: â€Å"thus ends on an ironic note: to save Tee, who is unable to return to the Caribbeanness she has known in Tantie’s household through having become interact in the worship of Englishness, Tantie sends her to the ultimate source of this cultural negation: to the metropolis, to Englandâ €\r\nâ€Å"Hodge goes to great pains to portray the cultural nonstarter of playing monkey to the Great White Ancestor. In this important respect, the narrative, which in the fiction a uprise Tee relates, places considerable vaule on the vulnerable African oral culture that so easily succumbs to the power of the written”. Crick Crack Monkey cease gives us a hope for Tee who goes to London and â€Å"The goal of the novel, it seems, is not to idealize a lose African past but to reveal the cultural sovereignty of Trinidad.”\r\nBIBLIOGRAPHY:\r\nWeb sites:\r\n* BILL CLEMENTE: The A, B, C’s of Alienation and Re-Integration : Merle Hodge’S Crick Crack Monkey\r\n* http\\Clemente.htm\r\n* http\\crick crack monkey study guide.htm\r\n* The dickens Worlds of the Child: A study of the novels of three West Indian writers; Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, and George Lamming\r\n* http\\Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming.htm\r\n* Two Postcolonial Childhoods :Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey\r\nand Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dan\r\n* http \\Jouvert 6_1 †2 Martin Japtok, Two Postcolonial Childhoods Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing.htm\r\n* http \\merle.htm\r\nbooks:\r\n* HODGE ,MERLE. Crick Crack, Monkey. Andre Deutsch, 1970; London: Heinemann, 1981; Paris: Karthala, 1982 (trans. Alice Asselos-Cherdieu).\r\nLectures:\r\n* Lectures by Mrs. MAHADAWO on Island Literatures.\r\n'